Chekhov’s Gun - a dramatic principle that suggests that details within a story or play will contribute to the overall narrative.
This encourages writers to not make false promises in their narrative by including extemporaneous details that will not ultimately pay off by the last act, chapter, or conclusion.
Chekhov’s gun has become a highly influential theory of effective writing that mandates noticeable details are integrated into the plot trajectory, character development, and mood of the work.
Tips on How To Use Chekhov's Gun In Writing
Chekhov’s gun can be deployed for various purposes to indicate several different things.
Remember, Chekhov’s gun is not a literary device. It is a theory about the economy of detail within plotted narratives. It’s not something you do as much as something you follow.
To follow it, consider the details you include. This means you need to think about whether they are fits of fancy or they actively contribute to the overall plot structure.
Feel free to break the rules sometimes. Red herrings, or details included to throw the reader off subsequent plot twists, are by design details that violate Chekhov’s gun. Leaving readers to suspect the wrong person of the crime in the mystery by surrounding them with implicating but ultimately circumstantial details is an effective technique.
Foreshadow plot twists with details that, when the twist is revealed, become necessary to the story. If your main character’s mother is a serial killer, you might foreshadow this by having a character comment on her frequent trips out of town in the first chapter and her remote storage locker in the third chapter. That these details will pay off when the twist reveals itself is Chekhov’s gun in practice, the promise that emphasizing such otherwise trivial storage and travel details will ultimately prove relevant to the story.
Anton Chekhov was a 19th century writer of short stories and plays and one of the greatest authors and playwrights of the modern era. The author of Uncle Vanya and The Seagull, Chekhov has become a central figure in literary history and criticism.
The term “Chekhov’s gun” emerged from the ways Chekhov repeatedly characterized writing in letters to his contemporaries. The most famous version advises: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
Other versions include a loaded rifle instead of a pistol, but the underlying point remains the same: if something in your narrative grabs the reader’s attention, that detail has narrative work to do and must be significant to the overall work. Otherwise, its significance is lost on the reader and authors are writing checks they can’t cash, including tantalizing details and possibilities that will ultimately go unfulfilled.
It is important to note that Chekhov’s gun is a literary concept and dramatic principle, not a rhetorical device—it is not something authors deploy, but rather a guidepost they follow.
While the principle of Chekhov’s gun is straightforward, there is some confusion around what actually constitutes Chekhov’s gun. Other tools and analytics—like MacGuffins and red herrings—are related to or follow the rules of Chekhov’s gun, but are not interchangeable with it. This confusion is best resolved by considering what details a reader will likely notice in a story.
Some details will be noticed regardless of context and the author doesn’t need to draw attention to them to get the reader to notice. A gun or other weapon, a giant diamond ring, and a mysterious briefcase, for instance, will always be noticed, whereas others, like a fedora, will not. Noticeable details should always payoff in stories, regardless of how much emphasis the author gives them.
An everyday vase will go unnoticed unless the author specifically draws them out with extended commentary and rhetoric. A floral vase on the table is easily overlooked but, if the author repeatedly draws attention to it, Chekhov’s gun dictates that this vase had better be significant to the overall story—perhaps in addition to flowers, it holds the codes to the French nuclear arsenal.
If an author doesn’t draw attention to such details, however, they do not need to follow this rule. A traffic jam in LA is nothing noteworthy and noting it in the narrative does not mean it must follow Chekhov’s gun and ultimately prove significant. If the author, however, prates and prattles about the traffic,then it falls into Chekhov’s gun territory and must prove important.
Chekhov’s gun can suggest a story is tightly woven, with emphasized details ultimately helping to shape the narrative.
Perhaps the best example of Chekhov’s gun principle in action comes from examples of Chekhov and his work. In Act I of his play The Seagull, for example, the main character carries a rifle out onto the stage. By the end of the play, he has used the riffle to commit suicide. Such a detail—a rifle, in the main character’s hand, on stage—would appear superfluous were it not to figure into the plot’s development and would have violated Chekhov’s own principle had it not been the instrument of the character’s death.
Successful literary tools and plot structures—like foreshadowing—can also be described by Chekhov’s gun, which is a rule effective foreshadow follows.
Though it is not a literary technique, Chekhov’s gun can be a useful analytical tool for critics that can be used to describe narrative shortcomings. Saying that a particular work did not adhere to Chekhov’s gun suggests the story was unfocused, concerned by insignificant details that did not figure into the larger work.
In Paris this week, he said: “I am interested in the horses that dance and I want to give them some carrots and apples … make sure they’re fed before they do their thang.”
Stewart explained the pair’s dressage plan.
“Snoop called me and said he knows I know horses, and he’s a little fearful of horses,” the businesswoman, philanthropist and octogenarian Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model told NBC on Friday.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths - the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
iwtv is so fun because it's not really about vampires who happen to be gay. it's about gay ppl with personality disorders who also happen to be vampires
The year is 2042. Your daughter is awkwardly silent as she eats her dinner. “Something wrong sweetie?” She sighs and puts down her fork. “I was digging really deep in AO3 last night…Why didn’t you finish that coffee shop au?” It happened. Your past has come back to haunt you. Nay, it never truly left.
OKAY BUT WAIT. This has happened to me. Recently. Because I am old and I have things out there from previous fandoms with previous pseuds and one day my teenager begins a rant at me about people never finishing any WIPs on the pit of voles (which he does not call the pit of voles because he has No Knowledge of such a thing but yet he still reads on which I didn’t think anyone did any longer) and he points out an example to me of something I WROTE AND LEFT WIPing for ages and he has NO IDEA #1 that his mom wrote this and #2 How much it still haunts me to this day that it will. sit. there. for. eternity. because I am too lazy to pull it down.
